A cloud service may provide access to one or more multi-user applications accessible via a data network, such as the Internet. The cloud server may provide each application in a separate computing environment. For example, each application may be executed on a separate server system or cluster of a cloud service.
In some cases, different applications executed on different clusters may be accessible via the Internet or another data network via different network identifiers. For example, a cloud service may be accessible via a uniform resource locator (“URL”) such as “cloud_service.abc”. The cloud service may also include a marketing application and a social media application hosted on different clusters accessible via the respective URLs “marketing.cloud_service.abc” and “social_media.cloud_service.abc”. Subscribers to the cloud service may have client accounts specific to the marketing application or the social media application. For example, a user name and password used to access the marketing application via the URL “marketing.cloud_service.abc” may not be usable for accessing the social media application via the URL “social_media.cloud_service.abc”. Alternatively, different clusters used for accessing a common application may handle different subsets of client accounts. A user whose client account is managed by a first cluster may be unable to access the cloud service via second cluster that manages different client accounts.
Prior solutions for addressing this problem may present disadvantages. For example, prior solutions may involve using a centralized authentication server accessible via the URL “cloud_service.abc”. The centralized authentication server can authenticate both users of the marketing application and users of the social media application. Using a centralized authentication server may decrease the responsiveness of the cloud service due to high traffic loads. Using a centralized authentication server may also create a single point of failure for accessing the cloud, thereby decreasing the reliability of the cloud service.